Programming Project 1
Due date:
Mon, Oct. 13, 2014 at 1pm (before class).
Description: For the first project, you are requested to decide if a pair of
nodes in a social graph is connected with an edge or not. We will be using an
online platform (Kaggle, http://inclass.kaggle.com) to host this competition. The tasks that you need to solve are the following:
Task 1: Identification of co-authorship links:
We provide you with a snapshot from DBLP. This network contains
information about researchers and their work. The nodes of the network are people and the edges represent co-authorship. This means
that if two researchers have collaborated on at least one paper, then
there exists an edge that connects them. As supporting material,
we give you, for each researcher, the most important terms from the
titles of their papers and their respective frequencies.
Task 2: Identification of social links:
You will be working on a sample from Flickr’s network, trying to
predict friendship between users. Each node in the network is a
Flickr user and an edge between two nodes indicates that these users
are friends. To help you with this task, you will have access to the
groups in which each user is a member.
Evaluation: The evaluation method that will be used is the AUC (area under
curve). This is a measure that handles unbalanced data (e.g, in case there exist
more true negatives than true positives).
Data: For details on the data files check each individual competition, under
the page ”Data”. There you will also find descriptions of the files.
Writeup: In addition to submitting your solution online, you need to provide
us with a 2-page writeup that describes the algorithm you have implemented
and the special tricks you used in order to make it work. Also, describe your
strategy for selecting that particular algorithm and how you did your offline
evaluation of the method.
Instructions: If you don’t have an account for Kaggle, you will need to signup.
Go to http://inclass.kaggle.com and use your BU email. After that,
search for BU CS 565 2014 and you will find 2 active competitions. Take part
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and submit solutions for both of these competitions. You may upload
your predicted solution as a .csv file at “Make a submission”. We suggest that
you don’t just upload your final solution, but instead submit all your intermediate ones so that you can check your standing. You can see how well your
solution is ranking if you go to the “Leaderboard”. Notice that the deadline on
the competition page may not be accurate.
If you encounter any problems, send an email at natalir@bu.edu
Privacy and confidentiality: Important: Please write the usernames you
used to sign up with on your project report and send them to Natali natalir@bu.edu
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